Posted 03 February 2017

PS4 system software 4.50 beta starts today

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Starting today, those of you lucky enough to be chosen for the PS4 system software 4.50 beta (codename Sasuke) trial will be able to get your hands on the new features from the forthcoming update. Keep an eye on your email inbox – if you were chosen, you’ll receive an email with details of how to download the update and get started.

In the meantime, here’s a quick overview of the biggest features coming your way. For this update, we’ve focussed on some of the things that you, the PS4 community, have requested most often – including external HDD support, custom wallpapers and more ways to connect and share with friends.

External HDD support

Struggling to find space for all the games you want to play? Well worry no more; you can now connect a USB 3.0 external HDD and download, save and install games, apps and add-ons directly onto your removable HDD. You can also move any games and apps you’ve already saved onto it to help you stay organised.

When you connect the external HDD, everything will be accessible from your PS4 Home Screen as normal. What’s more, your PS4 will support an external HDD up to 8TB in size, giving you a huge amount of space to play with.

Custom wallpapers

If you’ve captured a truly epic in-game moment with the SHARE button, you can now set it as the background image for your PS4 Home Screen. To make sure the Home Screen icons and text don’t get lost against your new wallpaper, you can tweak the drop shadows and brightness of the menus to keep them clearly visible.

If you’re feeling particularly creative, you can also use SHAREfactory’s Photo Mode to edit your screenshots and make something entirely unique to use as your wallpaper.

Quick menu refresh

System software 4.0 introduced the Quick Menu (accessed in-game when you long-press the PS button on your DUALSHOCK 4) and the latest update further enhances this popular feature to make it even more user-friendly.

The Quick Menu will cover less of the game screen, and you’ll now be able to create, join and manage Parties on the go, meaning you can connect with friends without having to leave the game.

Post status updates to your PlayStation Network activity feed

Just like updating your Facebook status or posting to Twitter, you can now post updates directly to your PSN activity feed. You’ll be able to add simple text updates, tag friends, add screenshots and include specific games, then send your updates to appear in the What’s New section for all your PSN friends to see.

You’ll also be able to send your in-game screenshots to the Live from PlayStation section as a Public Activity, meaning players from around the world can see your best moments as they happen.

3D Blu-ray support for PlayStation VR

If you’re a PS VR owner, you can now use your PS4 to play 3D Blu-ray discs and watch them in stereoscopic 3D via your headset.

This is just a taste of the features included in system software 4.50, so make sure to keep an eye out for more information, including launch timing, in the upcoming weeks.

For those taking part in the beta trial, we hope you enjoy trying out these new features and, as always, your feedback is really important to us.

They already said years ago that they wouldn’t add that.They may change their mind some time down the road. But don’t expect to get a feature they have already said no to. Waiting for something that has already been negated is not that smart.

Oh I do so hope those “more features included in 4.50” encompasses setting the internal rendering resolution on the Pro to 2160p then downsampling to 1080p display as a system function. There are not many, but some quite noticable games that run without any supersampling for 1080p users, while Mark Cerny openly promised supersampling as a key benefit for those!

Just seen a Eurogamer article translated from Japanese regarding a PS4 Boost mode for unpatched software. Hardware supersampling is what I want the most. Gutted that ND removed the option from TLOU when they had no reason to.

This is something I desperately want for chat audio also. My headset requires me to change the audio device every time I use it else I have constant audio drop outs. Would be nice to have the option to set to both or have it stay on my prefered choice!

This is what happens when developers / publishers [DELETED] too much. Consumers start over-analyzing, thinking “it’s too good to be true”, with a lingering sensation Sean Murray is somewhere laughing maniacally. I wonder if my external HDD will be able to see other external HDD if they happen to come across one another. I know the universe is vast and all, but it can happen…

Hmm… “Status Updates” huh? Close to the status we used to had on PS3 above our PSN name but not quite… wish they brought that back but, we’ll see how that goes. Like this comment if you want to bring comments back! ;D

tech question, with external usb 3.0 hdd support, I take it (unwritten thus far) that the data stored on the external hdd will be locked to the individual system, rendering all the data useless should you have to change your system via an upgrade/replacement?

Of course that’s not listed. However, considering the way the internal HDD works, encrypted using a key just for that PlayStation, I would not be surprised if it formatted any external disk the same way. But who knows.

I hope the custom wallpapers for main screen are easy to set up and i bet a future update we can add custom animated wallpapers and icons or a custom wallpaper creator also can we use images from personal photos as wallpapers like forrest photos etc

I hope this update will include a filesystem optimization to take full advantage of SSDs, since it still has HDDs in mind. Also, I hope the overall UI will be smoother and more fluid, it’s become a bit slow lately.

External hard drive storage is really good 8Tb!. But what about internal hard drive upgrade? Considering scale whats the highest internal hard drive possible ? It’s 2 Tb at the moment. I think 6Tb is the highest because of size of parts?. So is the internal hard drive getting updated? Using a external hard drive is second choice.

GTIGAMER – Currently the internal HDD can only be upgraded to 4TB as defined in Software Update 3.50. Anything over 2TB tends to be more than cost of the console itself, or it was a while ago.

The launch PS4 had a 500GB HDD as standard and I believe the new PS4 Slim and the PS4 Pro both have 1TB as standard. Seeing as this is all related to hardware, a firmware update will not be able to amend anything.

I don’t think Sony have any plans to add additional HDD capacity in future iterations of the PS4.

Please solve messages problemWhy we can’t delete messages ????????????????????????????????????when i talk to someone and delete the messages btween us and sent to him again the old messages come back again this is biggest problem ever

Nothing for me here. Rather delete some stuff than go with an External HDD. More for digital gamers, I suppose.Custom wallpapers is ok but I’ll stick to my purchased dynamic themes (Firewatch theme still ftw).Quick menu I hated since the makeover. I liked it better when it covered my entire screen, it looked better and had a simpler set-up. It seems geared towards quick game suspending now. I only ever use it to quit a game.Activity feed can go altogether for my part. No interest in VR either.

Only thing I can come up with right now is to support in-ear microphones (that connect to your controller) other than Sony again. All of a sudden all of my Apple or other brand mics stopped working (the microphones at least) and I hate big headsets.

As a PSVR user, I hope the next update will include:– Trophies and notifications visible while using the PSVR headset.– Notification sound effects on/off.

It’s very distracting when you constantly hear the notifications sound effect but can’t see them while using PSVR. And I don’t want to turn off notifications manually every time I play a VR game (and forget to put them back on while playing regular games). An option to turn off the notification sound effect only would help keep us immersed in VR.

wallpapers are not a issue for me, but game icon’s what are push out with the games I buy are, I want a more personal theme to my game collection! I want option for my game icon’s, can this be intergrated to the store from game developers please!. for example game symbol and game name plack options, it would be nice to just have the name of my game on the icon’s, please consider game icon’s in the same light as wallpapers.